Elana Johnson - Writing and Releasing Rapidly

H ello! Im Elana Johnson, a two-time USA Today bestselling author, Amazon bestselling author, Kindle All-Star Author, and have been making six-figures just with my writing since 2016. Three years, going on four with that income, and it goes UP each year not down.

I started writing in 2007, and Ive been in the business through ups, downs, curves, pits, and more. I started in traditional publishing and have had 4 literary agents sell my work from here to France, in audio, paper, and ebook formats.

Ive written for Hallmark. Ive worked with editors from four publishing houses. Ive had big deals and highs, and low lows and slumps.

Through it all, I kept writing.

I entered the self-publishing scene in 2014 as a screw it way to tell my publisher theyd be upset they passed on my book. No lie. As if they cared. LOL.

But I cared, and I wanted to write what I wanted to write.

Go back and read that line again. In todays marketplace, its all about writing to market. I do thatand I dont. I write what I want to write. This was a lesson I learned in 2013, when Simon & Schuster wanted a book similar to the young adult dystopian trilogy Id already sold to them. So I gave them that. And they passed on it becauseit was TOO similar to the YA dystopian trilogy Id already sold to them.

I was like, SCREW IT. Some of you might use more colorful language.

But that defining moment in my career turned me to self-publishing, and I now only write what I want to write.

You dont have to write military sci-fi just because its popular. Or billionaire romance. Or erotica. I know a lot of authors, and every one of them gets tired of writing what theyre writing. The reason we keep doing it?

We love it.

If you dont, itll show in your books and eventually youll burn out. And since the point of this book is to help you write and produce and publish FASTER, we dont want you burning out or being discouraged in the process.

But I think thats first. Write what you love.

So when I published in 2014, I published a YA contemporary romance novel in verse. Say that five times fast. ;)

It was a book of my heart. It went to four acquisitions meetings at traditional houses and no one would buy it. Verse novels arent in, theyd say. Or we dont know how to position this in the market, I heard.

So I self-published it, and I still freaking love that book. It doesnt sell anything. It did at first, but our Indie Publishing Climate (IPC) doesnt support books just taking off on their own like the self-publishing boom of late 2011 and early 2012. Yes, I was around then too.

Todays IPC is different, with so many more players in the game. But thats not what this book is about. This book is about rapid releasing and why you might choose this method to launch a series, or your career.

Ive sidetracked again. I do that a lot. Sorry.

Back to 2014. The self-published novel did okay. I wrote another novel-in-verse and published it too. I had some old YA SFF on my hard drive, and I published that too. I remember a distinct feeling I had when I put that first book up on KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).

It was addicting.

I wanted to do it more.

I needed to do it more.

And I did a lot of it wrong. But I had my traditionally published YA dystopian novels, some YA SFF out there, an adult fantasy that Amazon Press picked up, and things were going okay. Not great. Just okay.

I hit a major slump and flailed around for about 18 months. I was still writing, sure, but my books werent selling, and I honestly wondered what the point was.

Some of you might be in that boat right now. Or the ship you used to be in is sinking, and youre wondering if you get in the lifeboat or abandon writing, er, the ship altogether.

Ive been there.

If you havent been there as an author yet, you simply havent been around long enough. Or youre really lucky. LOL. Or maybe both.

The point is, weve all been there.

For me, I liken it to being a pilot. Im in the plane, and things are going okay. Then theres a bird strike, and I have a choice to make. Water landing in the Hudson in January? Or death?

Both of those options are bad, right? Captain Sullenberger knows. Watch Sully and youll know too.

But I cant think of that airplane pilot or watch that movie without sobbing. Because I get it. Ive been in that seat, thinking What the heck am I going to do now?

Maybe I should just quit.

Whats the point? No one reads my books.

I cant make money at this.

Etc, etc. etc.

If youre there, accept his virtual hug.

And dont give up.

Its time to get smart.

So lets get smart.

T here are probably a dozen books about writing to market. Im not going to reinvent the wheel, but I am going to start at the beginning.

You should too. Dont skip some steps in your publishing career the way I did. Or if you already have, one of the greatest things about Indie Publishing is you can fix those mistakes. (That back log of books on my hard drive I self-published? Theyre not for sale anymore. Youre welcome.)

So up first, we need to talk teaching.

Im a teacher by profession. I spent almost twenty years in an elementary classroom, teaching hundreds of students a day as they rotated in and out of my computer lab every thirty minutes. Just take a moment and imagine that.

It was my life. I was very good at it. I have a teachers heart, and I want everyone to learn, do what they can do, and be successful.

Thats why Im writing this book. I want you to learn what you need to do to be successful. You may not be able to do everything in this book. You cant do what someone else does. You can only do what you can do.

I think thats so important that Im going to type it again: You can only do what you can do.

And we can all learn. But we need to learn smartly.

In teaching, we sit in meetings for four or five days before the students come to school at the beginning of the year. Some meetings are good, and some are bad. I mean, theyre meetings. But I learned something very early in my teaching career that applies to Indie Publishing: Start as you mean to go.

When you start a school year with children, you better do it in such a way that you can tolerate their subsequent behavior for the next 10 months of your life. If you dontits very hard to fix.

Indie Publishing is the same way. You should start as you mean to go. This includes decisions on:

Genre what are you going to spend your time writing? Can that genre sustain you over many books and many years (hopefully) of your career? Do you like writing those types of books? And I mean, really like writing those types of books? Because youll be writing a lot of them. Even the most seasoned authors get tired of writing the same books over and over. Or maybe thats just me. ;)

How saturated in this genre? Can you expand to other types of books within this genre? Or are you limited to young adult dystopian novels or zombie romance novels?

TIP: Think big, then niche down. For example, my pen name of Liz Isaacson writes Christian contemporary romance. Thats BIG. But if you niche that down, shes one of the only authors writing Christian contemporary